A DC-area Mommy, gamer, coder, archer, and general bon viveur, Aimee is thrilled to be passing her passion for life on to her two sons.

When playing at adulthood, she develops ecommerce sites and documentation for Virid. When playing online, she is a Community Manager for Genia Games and Citadel Studios. In the spare time she wishes she had, Aimee writes for Game Geex on Aggro Range.

Aimee is a Competent English Speaker™ and fluent in Standard Galactic.

Hotlink Followup – Allowing Certain Sites To Use Your Images

Hotlink Followup – Allowing Certain Sites To Use Your Images

Hotlink Followup – Allowing Certain Sites To Use Your Images

September 9, 2014Aimee Jarboe

Last month, I explained how hotlinking works and why it’s essentially stealing. I also explained webservers and configuring Nginx webservers to refuse hotlinking requests. It’s a wonderful, powerful little change! But sometimes for the sake of your readers or SEO purposes, you want to allow sites to use images straight from your server—like so:

Thankfully, this is an entirely simple fix. Remember the line where I told my webserver to allow requests from my own site? Sure you do. It’s the one that starts “valid_referers”.

To the end of that (before the semicolon), I tack the URLs that are allowed to request images:

Boom.

Simple!

Now, if you use an RSS feed reader to follow Aggro-Range, you’ve probably noticed that not all entries show images at all. That’s because WordPress doesn’t share featured images via RSS feed; by default, only images in the article show up in a feed reader. You can add that feature either via plugin or by adding a function to your theme. If you’d like to see how to make that change, let me know in the comments!